# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_1878_S13
# AI translation — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

— 13 —

...could hardly hear a word of the sermon over the noise; they "think,"
Luther added, "that it is more necessary and more fitting to hear a
carpenter's axe than the Word of God." (Vol. XIV, 1362.) With a heart
broken over this misery, Luther at last sank into the grave. — But if God, in
Luther's lifetime, had through this his chosen instrument still preserved the
pure Gospel for our church, despite the ever more rampant ingratitude
toward it and despite all the corruption of life pressing in upon it, still, soon
after Luther's death, the judgment that ingratitude and an unchristian life
alongside pure doctrine have always met with was carried out inexorably:
unity in pure doctrine was lost. — With the coming about of the Formula of
Concord thirty years later, the light of the pure Gospel indeed rose again and
thereafter shone without interruption in bright splendor for a full century —
a phenomenon for which we can scarcely find its equal in the whole history of
the church. Yet even this time of great gracious visitation resembled other,
shorter times of rich grace in this: that in it, too, life lagged far behind
doctrine. What contributed most to this was that the yoking of the church
with the state, which arose after Luther, lay upon it like a ban, in that
discipline of life all but entirely collapsed under it. But the longer God had
preserved his pure Word for the church, despite all ingratitude toward it,
through faithful workers and fighters, the more swiftly the ungrateful church
afterward fell from stage to stage, until at last it became a den of murderers
of unbelief and a Babel, from whose ruin souls can save themselves only by
immediate flight.

So we see then, reverend and beloved fathers and brothers, that the history
of every age confirms as truth what the godly [Johann] Arndt writes: "The
purity of doctrine and of the divine Word is preserved not by disputation
and many books alone, but also by true repentance and a holy life."*)

The question therefore now arises: has the history of our own Synod already
refuted everything said so far, or may we nonetheless hope, under all
circumstances, that its future course will differ from that of those fallen
churches to which God had once entrusted his pure Word? — Let us then
today first take a look at our past and at our present condition.

However short the span of time during which our Synod has existed, we
cannot, at the outset, conceal from ourselves that the time of our Synod's
first love, which we older members of it once witnessed, is gone. For a
number of years now our Synod, even as it has spread outwardly ever more
quickly and widely, has instead, inwardly,

*) [Johann Arndt,] *True Christianity* [*Vom wahren Christenthum*], Book One, ch. 39.